Longing for Home

Friday's Mens Fellowship is studying "Prodigal God" by Tim Keller and chapter six - Redefining Hope talks about our longing for home.  As he mentions "Home is a powerful and elusive concept".

We all talked about the definition of "home".  How going back to a childhood home long since moved from was disappointing.  Moving constantly causes less connection to a physical place as home. Mental images of home are sometimes just a fantasy.

I've blogged about home many times (both the physical and mental place with songs) - 10/24/10 Home Again, 10/25/10 John Denver - Back Home Again, 11/16/10 There's no place like Kansas, 12/17/10 It's Home, and 6/7/11 Home Head or Heart. 

"The strong feelings that surround it [home] reveal some deep longing within us for a place that absolutely fits and suits us, where we can be, or perhaps find, our true selves.  Yet it seems no real place or family actually satisfies these yearnings, though many situations arouse them" says Keller.

C.S. Lewis calls it spiritual homesickness. In his sermon "The Weight of Glory" he states - "These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers."

Heaven is the home we long for (case in point - the Heaven Board).  Yet we are frustrated by the "conflicts of heart" in this physical world and the "inevitable entropy of time" pitted against with the human physical desire for eternal life. 

Longing for home is the hope of spiritual completeness.  As Keller concludes - "We will come, and the father will meet us and embrace us, and we will be brought into the feast."  The joy of arriving home.